


En continuant

by sshysmm



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Family Bonding, Gen, Injury Recovery, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Reconciliation, ScotSwap Exchange, Siblings, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, we're healing and dealing with our shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:33:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24488281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: For one who had always had to fight for her place - who knew the ceaseless weariness of justifying her existence - the undemanding love of those around her would only have baffled Marthe. She had been a missile on a course of destruction, driven to deliver her news into the heart of a family that she saw did not want her. There was no sentimentality left in what Marthe had felt about Francis, Philippa, Richard or any of the others. She would not have looked for a kind word in the yard, and yet now she lay, delirious but pliant beneath the many hands that pushed her golden hair back from fever-sticky skin, those that squeezed her knuckles as their owners told her she could come through this, and those that clasped together in prayer over her bedside.Marthe survives the end of the series and has to come to terms with Francis's choice to destroy the document she brought him. Healing at Midculter, she tries to understand her place in the family that bears her less ill-will than she expected.From Lise's prompts:6. Prompt for an AU: Marthe lives AU! post-series terrible siblings.7. Prompt for a non-AU: post-series everyone dealing with their trauma.
Relationships: Marthe & Francis Crawford & Richard Crawford
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise/gifts).



She was not to know that it ran in the family, this...continuing.

Just as Richard Crawford's strength had been drawn back to capacity after he took an arrow to the shoulder, just as Francis had been guided back - again and again and again - to life, now it was Marthe's turn.

She had no idea of the precariousness of her existence in those weeks following the encounter in the borders. The potential of death was on every breath that emerged from her pale lips; it lay in the worried expressions and words of those who attended her bedside.

Her hands were chill and could not flinch away from the worried grasp of the man she had married, and if her ears detected the sounds of disagreement between him and another, cooler presence, her mind did not discover the meaning of the noise. She was oblivious to the serious care that lay in the brown eyes of her hostess, to the easy way in which Marthe's well-being had been enfolded into the concerns of Flaw Valleys and all of its occupants.

For one who had always had to fight for her place - who knew the ceaseless weariness of justifying her existence - the undemanding love of those around her would only have baffled Marthe. She had been a missile on a course of destruction, driven to deliver her news into the heart of a family that she saw did not want her. There was no sentimentality left in what Marthe had felt about Francis, Philippa, Richard or any of the others. She would not have looked for a kind word in the yard, and yet now she lay, delirious but pliant beneath the many hands that pushed her golden hair back from fever-sticky skin, those that squeezed her knuckles as their owners told her she could come through this, and those that clasped together in prayer over her bedside.

One who did not try to lie to her unmoving form, who did not fuss or try to speak to her through the hard work of recovery, but instead simply sat with her in thoughtful silence, or played the lute softly as she healed, was Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sévigny. Brother to Richard and brother to Marthe.

For a moment, in between opening the document she had brought with her and destroying it, he had been something else, too - but he would leave that to the man who already held that position.

-

When consciousness began to return - drop by drop, ache by ache - she thought she was a little girl at her grandmother's house. No worry had been shown for her in childhood sickness - her stars had been read, and she was ordained to live - or perhaps it had not mattered if she lived or not, because she was not a son. So, she had been taught to lie in stoic silence, to endure what needed to be endured. It had never occurred to Marthe that she might have the luxury of choosing for herself whether to go on or not, and she battled on now, as she was accustomed to do.

Time came and went in shuddering moments of discomfort; to open her eyes was to see the turned wood of bedposts and to smell the herb-scented fire in the hearth; to hear the strains of music in another room, or male laughter outside the building. The latter was curious; it was not a feature of the childhood she thought she had drifted back into.

Her thoughts sluggish with fever, Marthe picked at the tapestry of sound until the continued mirth outside split the well of anger inside her. Anger focussed her: she opened her eyes and looked twice at the bedposts and the brocaded hangings, and she recognised that they were not the property of her grandmother.

The weight on her chest was not the weight of fluid in her lungs, but something with claws, sunk deep in her flesh and bone. Weakly, Marthe's hands pulled at the blankets covering her body, at the neck of her smock, which clung to the sweat on her throat. She caught a glimpse of bandaging beneath it, and the sight seemed to bring the pain associated with it into relief. With a gasp, she let her head fall back and her hands go limp. An involuntary mewl of pain hung on her lips and it was only the repeated shouts of joy outside her window that allowed her to cling, furious, to consciousness.

The journey she had made came back to her: Blois. Dieppe. Dover. A blasted cell, the curiosity and contempt of Englishmen, and then the admission that it had all been a misunderstanding. Free to go, she had ridden to the borders - and then?

Marthe swallowed drily and tasted the fever she had suffered from. Her hands moved carefully across the front of her smock, feeling the edges of the bandaging beneath, and beneath that, the edges of new healing skin, tender and over-sensitive.

The musket blast had hit her just to one side of her sternum, peppering her ribcage and chest with fire and debris. The wound was on the same side of her body that she had carried her trump card, the document that would at last force the Crawfords to acknowledge their sordid past.

Outside the window a child's voice said laughingly, admonishingly: "Richard, no!"

Marthe thought of her grandmother's long plan, of the star charts and the certainties she had been brought up to help achieve. How could it all have failed, a lifetime of effort ruined by a single, unlooked-for, musket ball?

-

The first visitor she was conscious for was a woman she did not recognise: homely like a hedgebird, dressed well but with cuffs edged by flour, not lace. Her face was like Philippa's. She helped Marthe to eat and drink, she cleaned her and tended to her bedding, and in her kindly expression Marthe found a bitter understanding of what Philippa had spoken of in the Topkapi palace: _I know what it is to need help_.

She did not fight the care, but she did not smile for her carer. She did not drag her limbs but she did not rush to arrange herself into an amenable form. She had intended to deliver her document to any household it concerned, and instead she guessed that it had been her own mangled body that had been delivered into the Somerville nest on the English border. She had been left to rack up debts against their generosity, when the means of payment had presumably been turned to ash beneath the shot of a musket, soaked and dyed in her own blood.

Yet Kate Somerville's kindness was not affected by Marthe's indifference, even as worry trod old paths into her brow.

She spoke in plain, soft tones as she wiped cool water into Marthe's hairline with a cloth. She explained that Marthe was at Flaw Valleys, and how she had come to be there - she had been shot, it had been a mistake, her friends had been there and had acted quickly.

Marthe remembered the little party that had approached her: Richard and Jerott riding ahead and behind them Philippa, Archie and Sybilla. All the audience that Marthe's letter required, bar one.

"Where is Francis?" she asked.

Kate's look turned momentarily sharp, though she hid it well beneath lowered eyelids. "He is not yet up. Shall I tell him you want to see him, when he wakes?"

"He is here?" Marthe swatted weakly at Kate's ministrations and tried to push herself higher up in the bed. The skin on her chest tightened in agony when she moved, and she subsided with gritted teeth and a demand in her eyes.

For a moment Kate studied her, and Marthe disliked the feeling that her health was being weighed against the information she could handle.

"He arrived shortly after you did," Kate said carefully. "Following an uncomfortable, though mercifully brief, residency with the Lady Lennox."

"And Philippa is here?"

Kate's expression judged her anew. "She is. They are reconciled, though I am still ignorant as to what they needed to be reconciled over."

Marthe felt the colour rush to her cheeks. She wanted to ask more, but the speeding of her heart made her wound ache again, deep and persistent. Kate Somerville observed her discomfort and arranged her skirts as she rose from Marthe's bedside. She prescribed rest, and left Marthe alone again.


	2. Chapter 2

Marthe's belongings had been placed in tidy arrangement on a chest by the window. It was only a few steps from the bedside, and she spent some time assessing her ability to handle the journey.

When she made it, her legs shaking, one hand flat over the agony in her chest, her hair sticky again with sweat, she stood hunched over the saddlebags and clothes. There was no sign of her old shirt or jerkin, and her cloak had been scrupulously cleaned and mended. Marthe checked the bags - just in case someone had put aside the remains of the letter out of respect for its carrier. She recalled sealing it with her husband's crest, and let out a painful, hollow laugh at the thought of him opening it - at the thought of Jerott being the first one to confront his idol with the news therein.

In the orchard outside her window a willowy blond boy was kicking rotten apples and laughing as a dog chased them. Marthe's eyes narrowed as she watched him, and with contempt in her voice, she muttered:

" _Mec on þissum dagū deadne ofgeafum_

_Fæder ond modor ne wæs me feorh þa gen_

_ealdor in innan þa mec ongon_

_welhold me gewedum weccan_

_heold ond freoþode hleosceorpe wrah_

_snearlice swa hire agen bearn..."_

The door opened behind her as she spoke, and a wry, chiding voice jumped ahead to the end of the riddle:

" _Siþas asettan heo hæfde swæsra þy læs_

 _Suna ond dohtra þy heo swa dyde_."

Marthe tried to draw herself straight as Francis Crawford entered the chamber. Her fingers tightened against her chest, as though she could hold the pain inside, push it down and quell it with the force of her grip. Instead, the movement made her vision pulse with darkness and Francis stepped forwards to steady her as she swayed.

She did not thank him, but she let herself be walked back to the bed.

"You were not, I think, risen like Lazarus because you simply had to appreciate the view." Francis settled on the chair beside her, and Marthe's fingers paled as she gripped the blankets and waited for the pain to fade again. "The Pennines are fine on a fine day, but not worth reopening a wound for. And it is not the season for cuckoos."

Marthe studied him. If he and Philippa were reconciled then some success had come of her grandmother's charts after all. She could still make sure this was finished properly.

"There was a packet in my clothes. I was bringing it to you."

Francis's eyes, blue and clear as a summer sky, narrowed minutely. "It is selfless of you to concern yourself with my correspondence before you ask for the details of your own health." His long fingers, bare but for a single golden fede ring, toyed with the rounded wood at the end of his armrest. Marthe recognised the movements after a while: he was practicing scales.

"I think I know enough," she said sourly. "I am in pain but it will fade. It may not leave me, but it will diminish. I am alive, and I would like to know what play I have missed. It would be unfortunate if I could not complete my task now."

"What you have missed?" Francis shook his head, as he had done in Amiens on their last meeting. " _Our peax, our play, our plane felicité_. All tasks she set are completed. The board has been reset. You are free."

Marthe gave an incredulous snort but felt her skin tingle with anticipation - out of excitement or fear at what he might mean. "The document?"

His features were unreadable, his tone measured: "I will not insult you by claiming ignorance of its contents."

Through the nausea that has risen with the pain, Marthe made herself speak, her blue eyes hungry for her brother's response. "And? Do I now speak with my Lord Culter?"

Francis's expression barely flickered. His brows lifted lightly as though she had said something gauche and inappropriate at gathering of polite company. He rested his beautiful hands on one silk-stockinged knee, and Marthe noticed, despite the quirk of his mouth, that there were deep shadows beneath his eyes, and he seemed thin and drawn still, as though the experience at Dourlans yet lay heavily on his health.

"No," Francis said firmly. "Lord Culter is returning to his seat, to see his wife and heir and to make ready the guest chamber for the woman he is willing to accept as his sister."

The anticipation she had felt boiled quickly over into rage, avoiding all but one implication in what he said. "Then what did you do with that packet?"

"I read it in the presence of the woman it concerns. She watched me destroy it, as did Philippa."

"You fool," Marthe spat. "How dare you?"

His expression was steady, unflinching as marble. "Would you tell me how to dispose of my own belongings, documents and all?"

"Where they concern more than your own richly privileged life, I would," she said through teeth clamped shut on the growing ache in her wound. Her breathing was heavy, and each movement of her ribcage brought with it the dragging talons of pain across her chest. "Did you stop to think how selfish that was? In order to avoid a single confrontation with the son of a base usurper?"

"It is not your fault that you are ignorant of how such matters play out in a family," his voice was as smooth as silk draped over steel. "The single confrontation that you so blithely imagine would be to ruin more than the one man whom you detest so fully and in such ignorance.”

Her eyes stung and the weight on her chest increased. Exertion and exhaustion made her shake, and Francis marked it all. “Then you fail, at her final task.”

“ _Beter to faille a litell in the iustice, than to be superflue in crualte_.”

“Noble sentiment,” Marthe said bitterly. “At no inconvenience, you may continue to live the life of a second son, while an oaf sits in a seat meant for a great man, and history remembers only the farmer and not the artist.”

If she hoped to rouse him to anger, her disappointment was only to be compounded. Francis looked at her with something uncomfortably near to pity in his heavy-lidded, cool gaze. “I think that, once, you hated me as you now hate Richard. If the price of your admiration was the loss of my first-born, I would save Richard from the same fate. If, however, it came of an increased understanding, through our shared travails, then perhaps there is something for you here, still.”

How could this have happened? Her grandmother was never wrong. Nostradamus had said –

Nostradamus had said nothing of substance. Nothing but – _we all die_.

When she did not speak, Francis took another breath and told her about Margaret Lennox and the accession of Elizabeth Tudor. He told her everything that had happened on the day she had been shot. He told her what he had heard, of Jerott restraining Richard when they had seen the musket raised towards the blond rider. Marthe listened, her eyelids growing heavy, her mind still wondering what each detail meant for the plans her grandmother had drawn up.

Finally, Francis’s account ceased, and he let the silence stretch until she said: “Is that all? Sir Gawain is not compelled to wear my head around his neck in penitence?”

“Jerott found his place in the pattern,” Francis said shortly. “Your marriage is as it was when he left France. I am telling you this so that you may exercise tact around those who witnessed the final moments of La Dame de Doubtance’s influence on this earth.”

Marthe let herself sink down into the pillows and blankets with a thoughtful sound. “So, Richard’s offer is made out of guilt. He thinks he might have saved me from injury had Jerott not stopped him.” She laughed, dry and mirthless, at the thought: that she had almost been saved from injury by the man she had set out to depose. That she might have been saved in order to present him with the truth instead of the gratitude he probably expected.

Her long mouth crumpled into a mean little smirk as she considered it. “And you would send me there, to Midculter, to be confronted by all that my upbringing lacked? And you would trust that I should remain silent on the matter of its inheritance, all for what? These dregs of kindness?”

The only sign that she was trying his patience was the increased speed of his breath, betrayed in the way the cool winter light glistened in the crystal buttons that decorated his jerkin. “Kindness, for my brother, is not the domestic chore it appears to have been for you, Marthe. I would not send you anywhere – it is long past time you chose for yourself which stars to travel under. But Richard has offered it, unbidden, and you might imagine that my mother and I have struggled to convey the arguments against it.”

“So, you do not trust me.”

“Should I?” Francis blinked slowly.

Like met like in the two pairs of cornflower blue eyes. The mask of confident amusement she had worn was brittle and behind it her regret swelled. What satisfaction could she win now? The pedestal had already been refused. She might shout the truth from the tiles of Edinburgh roofs to the streets of Protestant London, but nothing would be gained by it now, not by her, not, through his own stubborn choice, by Francis. The final moves had been played – after Marthe had been removed from the board.

This culmination of a lifetime of frustration glazed her eyes with tears, and Marthe waited, her proud lip bitten, until she could speak steadily. “ _Mi cama las duras peñas, mi dormir siempre velar_ …”

He sighed and his hands moved, his fingers curling around the ends of the armrests.

“ _Las manidas son escuras, los caminos por usar,_

 _El cielo con sus mudanzas ha por bien de me dañar_.”

Francis sat back in his chair, as drained of energy as she had been by the conversation. A wan smile lifted one end of his mouth minutely, and the shadows beneath his eyes darkened as his expression softened.

She was crying silently and did not raise her hand to wipe the tears away, but she did not refuse the embroidered handkerchief he offered.

Francis stood and turned his back to her. He looked out of the window to where Kuzúm played in the orchard and gave her a moment before he moved to leave with a polite smile.

“You may tell them I shall go to Midculter,” Marthe said stiffly.


	3. Chapter 3

For the final stretch of the journey she was alone with the servants - Francis and Philippa had left her to take the road to St Mary's, where they would begin the work of changing it from a barracks into a family home.

It was a long ride on a cold day, and Marthe was sore and tired when the towers of Midculter came into view. She did not marvel at the sturdy architecture or the colour of the local stone, which was dark against the white hills in the distance. Above the grey wash of frozen bog, the castle sat wreathed in smoke from the village that shared its name. It neither invited nor impressed; to Marthe's eyes it seemed as likely to be cold and damp within its walls as it was without.

When she entered the parlour with its vast stone fireplace, warm wooden furnishings, and bright tapestries, she refused to make a demonstration of delight or surprise.

Sybilla sat enthroned by the fire, her shoulders wrapped in heather-coloured blankets, her jewels like sparks thrown from the hearth. She smiled with her mouth, though her eyes were watchful, and her hands shifted their grip on the book in her lap. Opposite her was a black-haired woman who twisted to greet Marthe with pleasant openness - though her expression did not lack a certain trepidation. The younger Lady Culter did not stand. In her arms a child slept soundly, thumb in mouth, dark lashes curved, as though the Arabic letter _tāʾ_ had been painted above each round cheek.

The child she held was not the Master: he sat with his sister Lucy on stools arrayed close enough to their father's desk to catch the light of his candles.

Richard glanced up with fleeting acknowledgement, raised his pen in greeting, and then continued to finish the sentence he had begun to write as Marthe allowed the servants to take her cloak and outer garments.

There was no family that Marthe recognised in that crowded room: just dark, solid brows and square bodies, square jaws and tawny skin. Mariotta was sharp without the poise of her brother-in-law, and Sybilla, of course, had the same fine-boned grace that Francis did, but to Marthe it was merely a poor echo of the charms his other parent had been said to possess. Her cursory glance about the room did not identify any musical instruments, nor any sign of culture bar the well-worn octavo volume resting on the velvet of Sybilla's skirts.

She sniffed, gathering herself to make a comment, when Richard finished his words with a hasty scribble and stood, apologising.

"That wasn't a very good welcome, I am sorry. I find it best to get the words down quickly when they feel right," he said by way of explanation. He moved around the desk carefully, minding stacks of parchment and inkwells in addition to the stools and children around his feet.

With large, capable hands, he took up a heavy chair and set it between those of his mother and his wife, at a comfortable distance from the fire. "Please," he gestured towards it, and Marthe heard the boyish hope of approval in his voice.

"Of course, it's only our nearest and dearest who get such treatment - if you'd been a courtier or tenant, Richard would have been in attendance since you arrived in the yard," Mariotta added swiftly, with a nervous smile.

Marthe sat, folding the borrowed clothes of Kate Somerville around her chilled legs. For all her exhaustion she felt restless, and her eyes wandered ceaselessly over the walls and the furnishings, seeking out the history of the place.

"It was a long ride for you, I hope it wasn't too uncomfortable," Richard stood by his mother's chair, one hand on the back of the headrest.

"I've had longer rides," she replied.

Richard frowned, and then tried to mask it with a nervous laugh. "Not with an injury like that, one hopes."

"True, being shot was a first for me," Marthe's mouth curved in a sour approximation of a smile. From the corner of her eye she saw Mariotta Crawford's eyes widen as she exchanged a look with her husband - the gist of which, Marthe gathered, was that she reminded the Lady of her brother-in-law to an unsettling extent.

She endured the niceties of introductions and accepted the warm, sweet wine that was brought to her. It was late, and they knew she would be drained from her travels, so at least, she reflected, there would be little in the way of such forced pleasantries that evening.

Retiring when her body had been demanding that she do so for some time already, Marthe asked the servant at her door whether her room had belonged to the previous Master of Culter.

The response was prompt: it had not been his room. That remained unoccupied.

She thanked the maid curtly and closed the door on her offer of assistance. Undressing was a slow and uncomfortable process and Marthe preferred to undertake the task in private, without the need to consider what pain her expression showed as she moved stiff arms to the loosely laced bodice and farthingale.

Delaying the process, she walked around the borders of the room, taper in hand, examining the lightly carved panelling covering the walls, the damp collection of psalms left abandoned in a narrow windowsill, and the carefully arranged vase of seedheads placed as decoration on the sideboard. It was not a room that saw much use, evidently, and when Marthe climbed at last into the bedcovers - warmed with a pan of embers by the servants - and settled among them, she guessed, with haughty certainty, that she was not deemed worthy of Francis's old chamber. She guessed that Richard's father had purged everything of beauty and joy from the house during his reign of terror, and she nurtured a cruel satisfaction that without Francis at Midculter, it would continue its descent into uncultured drabness.

-

She suffered for the journey on the following day. The cold and damp got into the castle during the night, before the servants could rise and replenish the hearths. Marthe's back and legs felt hard and heavy after the long ride. Her shoulder and chest throbbed with a heat that did nothing to warm her extremities when she moved her feet beneath the blankets. Unable to imagine returning to sleep in such discomfort, she made herself leave her bed and wrapped her shoulders in thick wool. She paused by the window as she lit a taper and squinted at the pale reflection of her own face.

The ends of her hair had been trimmed for easier care: tendrils the colour of honeysuckle hung around the thin blade of her jaw and above her tense shoulders. The line of her frown was visible even in the rippled diamonds of glass, but her eyes seemed to take on the twilight colour of the sky outside. Sickness had sharpened her edges and made the shape of her face less like her brother's - though the similarity remained, as it always would.

Supposing that she would have the freedom to roam the halls in peace, she put on her slippers and moved stiffly into the corridor.

Even before the thin blue light of morning had penetrated the castle walls, she discovered that the place was not as bare and featureless as she had feared. She identified the classical tales and continental romances depicted on the tapestries, she examined furnishings and objets d'art and considered their age and origin. She ran her fingers over Eastern silk and Western walrus ivory, pressed her touch against the cold stone of busts and the cold metal of elaborate candle-sticks and concentrated on the texture instead of the dull, thudding pain that resided in her body.

Having been invited into the house, Marthe saw no reason why any of its secrets should be kept from her, and she tried any door that she encountered until she found herself in another parlour-cum-study, this one decorated with heavy, wooden-framed paintings hung over the oak panelling. There were more books in this room, and Marthe approached them eagerly, her forefinger outstretched, poised to lever one of the leather-bound volumes free of its shelf.

Her eyes were travelling hungrily down the page, her lips moving as she tasted the lines of poetry - new, very recently published verses by Ronsard, a volume of which she had left in the Parisian townhouse she had occupied. Yet despite her absorption she repressed nearly every sign of surprise when a smooth, weary-sounding voice addressed her unexpectedly.

"You look so very like him."

Marthe gazed at Sybilla with indifference and did not close the book balanced in her hand. "What an original observation."

The dowager did not respond, but entered smoothly into the room, her own light held high until it brought one of the portraits into view. Painted half a century ago, the first Baron stared down at them from beneath heavy eyelids, his face fresh and youthful. He looked like the man who had inherited his name, but the almond-shaped eyes and tapered jaw were striking. They aligned more with Marthe's features.

Marthe thought of the portrait of her grandmother in the hidden room at Blois. A sentimentality that she did not want to mean prompted her to ask: "Was he like that?"

"It is a fair likeness," Sybilla continued to look up at the Baron. "But where is a man's mind in his portrait? Where is his heart?"

At that, Marthe closed the copy of Ronsard with a snap and looked down, her expression tart with disappointment at this trite line of rhetoric.

The dowager continued to ignore her as she looked for something in the portrait's expression. Eventually, she said: "He loved Richard too, you know. When you think what he was denied - what cause he had for bitterness towards all who should have loved him best - and still he had only love for those in this house."

Sybilla met the cold resistance in Marthe's eyes without flinching. She turned and left, as serene as when she had entered.

When Marthe looked away again from the ground-lapis of the first Baron's stare the day outside had begun. At the window, she peered into a fog as dense and impenetrable as her future now seemed, and murmured, as though for his approval:

" _Tu es la Nymphe eternelle_

_De ma terre paternelle:_

_Pource en ce pré verdelet_

_Voy ton Poëte qui t’orne_

_D’un petit chevreau de laict,_

_A qui l’une et l’autre corne_

_Sortent du front nouvelet._ "


	4. Chapter 4

Marthe was a woman of many skills, but few of them were suited to quiet convalescence in a remote Scottish village. No instrument in that house needed tuning, no fortunes needed telling, no orders for silk or wine needed negotiating. No purpose revealed itself. She rebuffed all of Mariotta's attempts at conversation and chose, instead, to sit by a window with the copy of Ronsard unheeded at her elbow, staring at the sagging winter branches outside and testing her memory of Arabic poetry - occasionally she murmured a line out loud, frowning as she considered whether she had recalled it correctly. Her answers to Mariotta's questions about the subject of the poems remained monosyllabic.

Even so, she found that her initial disdain for Midculter soon shifted to a burning jealousy of those who had lived their lives there in blissful ignorance of the world's true face. The constant efforts of nursemaids and tutors were bolstered by a personal care and attention that Marthe wanted to find cloying, though it also left her with some other sentiment, like anunexpected aftertaste. She seethed uncharitably at Mariotta's hesitant pronunciation of Latin when she read with her children, and she thought that Sybilla coddled her grandchildren at the virginal and lute, neglecting to pick up on mistakes that should have been remedied. Marthe preferred to sit in the silent parlour, away from the lessons and chatter of the music room, away from Mariotta's stitching and Sybilla's letter-writing, and wait until she felt inspired to read. She saw little of Richard and supposed that he preferred to get his boots muddy and to speak the coarse dialect of his tenants.

Nothing changed in the December gardens Marthe gazed at each day, but eventually Richard ran out of occupations on the land - or wherever he had been, between rising and writing late at his desk - and returned to spend his days in the parlour among correspondence and accounts. Drawn by the sense of activity - of productivity, no matter how prosaic - Marthe turned her chair to face the room and watched Richard work.

He noticed her interest with cautious welcome and talked to her about the business of the estate in the practical, sober terms she would have predicted. He would not be drawn on any other matters, though she now detected an importance beyond the next year’s harvests in the way he pondered his letters. Instead, he asked her how she was enjoying the _Hymnes_ and told her, to her surprise, that he had bought the copy on their last journey to France, not Sybilla.

"If you want more reading, you should ask Kevin to bring some books down from Francis's room."

After Sybilla had interrupted her dawn exploration of the castle the other morning, Marthe had stopped wondering where her brother's belongings were, and has assumed they had been removed or redistributed as the family saw fit.

Now, on realising that the room had existed the whole time, kept from her by the rest of the household, she let her expression turn sardonic. "Am I not permitted to browse the library of Corvinus for myself? Did Jerott tell you I would only loot the place and sell its contents?"

A look of puzzlement passed over Richard's face. "No, if you want to go up there - but it's the tower room, the steps are steep, I thought you might find it an unnecessary effort. It's a miserable little garret, if I'm honest - the room you're in is newly converted, but more comfortable."

Marthe let out an impatient breath that might have held laughter. She looked out of the window. "Of course, you would forget that comfort includes books."

Richard, who was well aware of the implications of her words and noticed the haughty way in which she spoke to him, opened his mouth to correct her before deciding that it was not worth the argument. Speaking with her was like speaking with Francis at his most obtuse and irreverent, but there was an additional, maddening undercurrent of smugness running through all that she said.

"Perhaps you would find that the winter passes more quickly here in shared pursuits," Richard said carefully. "If you were to think of any that would amuse you."

Marthe shook her head at the window.

"What about music? You could give Kevin some lessons - he's outgrowing Sybilla's style of teaching, and from what I've heard, you're more capable than his tutor."

Marthe reddened. "I did not come here to be personal tutor to your children - would you ask the same of Francis?"

"Yes, of course," Richard did not hesitate. "If he wanted to do it, if it might prove diverting to him. Before, ah, before he was at the French court for the first time, we were in perpetual need of activities to keep him occupied. I know that it's more difficult when - "

"When I am not a man?"

"When you are injured," Richard said gently, but his expression showed some measure of horror. "I want you to feel like you can live here, Marthe, not that you are biding your time until something else presents itself."

The fire cackled and spat merrily in the big hearth, and Marthe's cool blue eyes searched Richard's hazel one for signs of mockery or deceit. Finding none, she affected a disinterested snort and turned her gaze back to the barren garden.

-

She did not ask for them, but the following day found a stack of volumes on her chair in the parlour. Hiding her smile in the empty room, Marthe discovered a satisfying variety in their contents: theology and mathematics, Spanish and Greek, literature both secular and devotional. Some she knew well, others she had never wished to read, but she took up a copy of the _Chronica Gentis Scotorum_ and began to learn the history of her ancestors' homeland.

Through it, the hungry, precise part of her mind to which learning came easily was stirred back to life: the Latin was a jigsaw made up of familiar pieces, the format was an established one, and the content was both new to her and as similar as any chronicle was to another.

Richard made no comment when he saw her reading it, and she felt a strange flicker of gratitude as he settled at his desk and proceeded quietly with his work.

Marthe devoured what she wanted of the selection and knew that no more would appear if she did not make the request herself this time. Still, she also knew where the room was now - she would browse it for herself.

To her bitter resignation, she soon found that she had dragged herself up the steep staircase only to meet a locked door. Her legs felt weak and raising one after the other to each high, curving step had left her light-headed, so she sat down outside the tower room to gather herself for the return journey. She decided that, winter or not, she needed to get out of the building, to walk among the grounds and the surrounding area and build up the stamina that had ebbed from her in her period of recovery.

As she waited, her eyes closed, listening to each sinew and tendon in her chest clamour with discomfort, another rhythmic beat joined the sound of her racing pulse.

Shoes slapping on stone: quick, habitual steps taken in solid, flat-footed confidence. Kevin Crawford was six years old and knew each stair like he knew every stone in the house. His breath was quick and his eyes bright when he rounded the curve in the staircase, and in his hand he held a key.

"Hullo!" He grinned. "Mum said you came up here. She asked me to bring the key."

Marthe gazed at this child who was brown-fringed, ruddy-cheeked, round-edged and frank: so distant from the true course of inheritance the estate should have followed. She did not move. "Is it locked to keep me out? Will you tell me what I can and cannot take from there?"

Kevin's quizzical expression was the image of his father's. "No, we lock it because the wind gets in. It comes in the window and the door slams. It's not a very nice room."

Marthe got to her feet and brushed her skirts down as Kevin stepped eagerly forwards to use all of his compact might in turning the heavy lock and pushing open the door. "It was good enough for your uncle, though?"

"It's just where he keeps his things," Kevin shrugged, leading her inside the sanctum and running his fingers unpretentiously over the pages and spines of many a volume. "He travels a lot and can't take his books with him."

Marthe let her gaze wander over the shelves and stacks as Philippa Somerville had done a few years before. The contents held little to surprise her, but there was no doubt that it had always been a carefully curated collection. She leafed through a number of volumes, setting those that appealed aside and laying them on the covers of the unused bed. Kevin mimicked her, picking up books, glancing at their pages with little interest, and then checking what she did with the ones she picked up.

"Oh! I know this one," he said, grabbing a volume she had put on the desk as not of interest. Falteringly, with extravagant pauses, he recited its contents:

" _Ní cheil maissi dona mnáib_

_ Temair cen taissi ar tócbáil; _

_ fúair ingen Lugdach 'n a láim, _

_ tul-mag bad líach do lot-báig _ ."

Marthe's head snapped up from the pages she had been perusing and she blinked down at the boy. "You read that well," she said, giving him a searching look.

Kevin chewed his lip for a moment, his cheeks flushed with pride. "Well, I only know some of the words. But I know what the poem is because Mum likes it."

The thought of nervy, domestic Mariotta teaching her children a language forced Marthe to rearrange a number of the impressions she had formed in the past weeks. She took the book when Kevin offered it to her and looked at the unfamiliar words. With a conspiratorial smile, she tossed it onto the bed and told him that perhaps he could tell her more about it later.

-

Mariotta brushed off Marthe's reluctant curiosity with self-deprecating laughter - "Oh, they're just silly rhymes, just fairy stories, really" - but she agreed to recite those that she remembered, bouncing her youngest child on her knee, her voice rising to something that reminded Marthe of birdsong as she chanted the poems in her native tongue.

She harboured no grudge if she remembered Marthe's reluctance to talk to her about Arabic poems previously, and seemed happy to teach Marthe what she had taught Kevin - a mother's lore of hotchpotch and disordered knowledge, alien to the structure of the classroom or the tutor's lesson. It frustrated, but Marthe extracted the information she could from it, nevertheless.

In exchange, she asked Kevin to play the lute for her, and showed him a better way of forming a chord that has been causing him difficulty. Later, Sybilla expressed her astonished delight with the cheerful Andalusian melody Marthe had taught him.

Early in the new year, Marthe allowed the Master to lead her on a tour of the grounds, where he proved enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the dry-stemmed plants lying dormant through the cold. She could not resist asking him whether the prospect of owning all of his surroundings excited him, and held her breath as Kevin turned silent, and his grip on her hand slackened while he gazed, thoughtful, at the castle.

"It's a lot of work. I don't mind that, but Dad's very busy. He used to play music for Mum and read to us more. When I'm the Earl I won't stop doing fun things."

Marthe's lips twisted wryly and she looked across at the distant chimneys of the village and the lilac-grey hills beyond. "I think you'll find that being Earl comes with its own fun things."

"I'll definitely buy a new lute," Kevin said with the decisiveness his position gave him.

Marthe jumped at the sound that emerged from her own lips: a bark of laughter that rang clear in the cold air, a sound of surprise and mirth that was all genuine.

Kevin's laughter bubbled up easily alongside hers and rose to a shriek of joy as he turned his attention to the road coming down from the valley. "Look! It's my uncle!"

The party from St Mary's was small and did not ride with banners unfurled and horns blowing, but the golden hair of the lead rider was unmistakable. It had been agreed many weeks previously that Francis and Philippa should be at Midculter for the end of the Daft Days of Christmastide, and Marthe had watched Mariotta's fastidious preparations for their arrival with a growing, grudging respect for the Lady's role.

On that dreich, black-skied January day, the castle was filled to brimming with more energy and song and music than usual - but the change was not abrupt and did not come as that imposed by a tortuous new regime. Francis and Philippa picked up familiar threads and together with the other Crawfords wove them into a tapestry of languages and art that even Marthe's stubborn, resentful heart could not resist. No one was omitted from the gaiety, no interest was judged unworthy: Philippa played animal noises for Lucy on the rebec as Richard, flushed with laughter, recalled bawdy poetry with his brother. Mariotta, no longer as easily shocked as she once had been, covered Kevin's ears as she supervised his play with the tabby kitten that had been brought from St Mary's for the mastering of Midculter's mice.

Sybilla spotted Marthe's wide-eyed, joyous expression as Philippa invited her down to the Persian carpet to play accompaniment to her toots and whistles, and her smile was a thing of wonderful restraint that only Francis noticed.

Learning that fun could truly be had and not just acted out at Midculter might take time, but between the afternoons of happy noise and the hushed, excited talk of politics around the hearth at night, Marthe took her first steps in this new area of study. She did not know if this life was any more normal, really, than the life she had grown up with - than the family she had grown up with - but she was finally coming to accept that it came without the conditions or restrictions that had ruled her choices before then. She wanted, at last, to stop resenting them, she wanted her interests to be seen as complementary but distinct, and she wanted to trust and be trusted, to be forgiven for what needed no forgiveness, like a cuckoo chick in a strange nest, like Kuzúm at Flaw Valleys.

She saw, in those days, that even without the title and the land, Francis remained the binding force among them all. His mother, brother, sister, wife, nephews and niece looked to him for all that he was capable of providing and - rested and healthy as he had not been in long years - he obliged them with pleasure. Richard asked for and took his advice without feeling threatened, and Francis showed no resentment of his brother's position.

Just as she tried to learn Irish from Mariotta's haphazard teaching, Marthe observed, and sought to learn how to be a Crawford.

" _If what brings us together is our common love for you_

_ I wish we would meritoriously share your bounties _

_ Each according to the love he harbors for you _

_ I have been in your presence while rapiers sheathed _

_ And gazed at you when swords blood-stained _ ..."

**Author's Note:**

> **Obligatory list of sources for quotes:**
> 
> [Old English Cuckoo riddle and translation](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Riddles_of_the_Exeter_Book/20):  
> [yeah, I know it's unlikely they'd have known it, but let's assume there's a Latin version that they both know]  
> Translation:  
> In those first days my father and mother  
> left me for dead: there was no life yet,  
> no life within me. Then a kindly kinswoman  
> faithfully covered me with her own clothing,  
> held me and cherished, kept me warmly,  
> even as gently as her own children—  
> [...]  
> Because of this now her own dear children,  
> sons and daughters, were fewer, alas.
> 
> "Our peax, our play, our plane felicité", from Dunbar, _The Thrissill and the Rois_
> 
> "Beter to faille a litell in the iustice, than to be superflue in crualte," from a translation of de Flores' _Histoire de Aurelio & Isabelle_, technically only just works as it was published in 1556, but I didn't have time to find the quote in the original version.
> 
> Quote from one of the poems Marthe and Francis recite together at Volos in PiF, from _Romance della Constancia_ , translated by DD in the Morrison Dunnett compation:
> 
> Mi cama las duras peñas, mi dormir siempre velar…  
> Las manidas son escuras, los caminos por usar,  
> El cielo con sus mudanzas ha por bien de me dañar.
> 
> My mattress is of bitter pain, my time of sleep is wakeful...  
> My shelter is a public way, My road unbending ranges,  
> The sky instead of gentle climes afflicts me with its changes.
> 
> [Ronsard's Ode to Fontaine Bellerie (earlier than the Hymnes Marthe's taken off the shelf):](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Odes_\(Ronsard\)/%C3%94_Fontaine_Bellerie)  
> Translation:  
> Eternal Nymph, you’re the grace  
> Of my ancestral place:  
> So, in this fresh, green view,  
> See your Poet, who brings  
> An un-weaned kid to you,  
> Whose horns, in offering,  
> Bud from its brow in youth.
> 
> [Mariotta's favourite Dindshenchas (place-name lore), about the strength of the women of Tara](https://celt.ucc.ie//published/T106500A/index.html):  
> Translation:  
> Temair free from feebleness hides not  
> the glory due to women for its building;  
> the daughter of Lugaid obtained in her possession  
> an open plain that it were pity to pillage.
> 
> And the final quote at the end is from a poem by Abu at-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, who composed the lines Marthe speaks to Francis at Amiens ('Lord, is there nothing in the cup for me?').


End file.
